V E R S E and I M A G E

New strung, it sparks a live wire

when sun hits right, and can be

thumbed like guitar string, its tune

pure country twang, but given

enough time rain rusts metal,

fence posts wobble like loose teeth,

barbed wire burrows in laurel

and goldenrod before found

by fishermen or hunters.

As I found out once, deep in

the Smokies when something latched

to my calf—coil of old strands

not quite elemented back

into ground ore, and though I searched

no chimney-spill or hearthstone,

no sign but rusty fence-thorns

of one whose hammer tapped out

a claim on this land traveling

through bright lines from post to post,

traveling time to a moment

one man’s tenuous hold on

the earth snagged like memory

surfaced long after, time-dulled,

but still able to draw blood.

from POEMS, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016

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I rose with the moon, left the drowsy sheets,

my nine months wife singing in her sleep,

left boots on the floor, overalls and hat

scarecrowing a bedpost so I could plant

my seeds with just a plow between

the earth and me, my pale feet deep

in the ridged wake where I labored,

gripped the handles like a divining rod,

my eyes closed to the few stars out.

All night I plowed, beard budded by frost,

chest nippled, my breath blooming white,

and felt in me the sway of the sea,

rain’s fall and soak, the taproot’s thrust,

the cicada’s winged resurrection.

I opened my eyes to dawnlight,

left my field and lay with my wife,

warming as I pressed against her body,

my hand listening to her waxing belly.

from POEMS, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016

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Between Wytheville, Virginia,

and the North Carolina line,

he meets a wagon headed

where he’s been, seated beside

her parents a dark-eyed girl

who grips the reins in her fist,

no more than sixteen, he’d guess

as the come closer and she

doesn’t look away or blush

but allows his eyes to hold

hers that moment their lives pass.

He rides into Boone at dusk,

stops at an inn where he buys

his supper, a sleepless night

thinking of fallow fields still

miles away, the girl he might

not find the like of again.

When dawn breaks he mounts his roan,

then backtracks, searches three days

hamlets and farms, any smoke

rising above the tree line

before he heads south, toward home,

the French Broad’s valley where spring

unclinches the dogwood buds

as he plants the bottomland,

come night by candlelight builds

a butter churn and cradle,

cherry headboard for the bed,

forges a double-eagle

into a wedding ring and then

back to Virginia and spends

five weeks riding and asking

from Elk Creek to Damascus

before he finds the wagon

tethered to the hitching post

of a crossroads stone, inside

the girl who smiles as if she’d

known all along his gray eyes

would search until they found her.

She asks one question, his name,

as her eyes study the gold

smoldering there between them,

the offered palm she lightens,

slips the ring on herself so

he knows right then the woman

she will be, bold enough match

for a man rash as his name.

from POEMS, New and Selected, HarperCollins, New York NY; © 2016

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Ron Rash will take you there. He will take you deep into to the forest where the unvoiced past may suddenly reach up from the earth and bite your leg. Into the night where moonlight unveils dreams and deep desires. Up a lonesome mountain holler where one of his own kinsmen once scratched to farm a living. Even deeper, farther, he will carry you into generations long grown cold but where a story of his early ancestor can still wring a warm and sudden smile.

This collection, Ron Rash’s New and Selected, covers decades of his writing but hundreds of years of settlement and stories, of life and death in the southern Appalachians. Each poem is the flare of a match that lights a lantern to limn a face, a moment, another turning point in another life. A history book might teach you about the Tennessee Valley Authority and farmers displaced by lakes filling behind its hydroelectric dams, but these poems will teach your heart how it felt to live on that land and watch it go under. The poems will teach you that poverty in possessions is not poverty of the soul. They might teach you that following your God can still involve some wrestling matches. Most of all, these poems connect – they tell one expansive enlarging straggling and struggling story of people and families each one of us is a part of. We are a part of these stories if we call ourselves Americans, and especially Southerners. Or if we just call ourselves human beings.

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Ron Rash – POEMS, New and Selected is available at Bookshop.org.

Also by Ron Rash at Verse and Image:

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NOTE: you can share three additional poems by Ron Rash at the sequel to today’s post, from July 17, 2026;

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